I ask because it would be nice to use the "I2P mixed mode" features of qbittorrent, but I want to keep my clearnet traffic on the VPN.

Background

I have I2PD running only on my home gateway for better tunnel uptime.

To ensure that torrent traffic never escapes the VPN tunnel, I have configured qbittorrent to use only the VPN Wireguard interface.

Problem

I think this means qbittorrent I2P traffic will flow into the VPN tunnel, but then the VPN host won't know how to route back to my home gateway where the SAM bridge is running.

I've configured my i2pd proxy correctly so things are somewhat working. I was able to visit notbob.i2p. But sometimes Firefox really likes to replace "http" with "https" when I click on a link or even enter the URL manually into the bar. I have "HTTPS-only mode" turned off, and I also have "browser.fixup.fallback-to-https" set to "false" and "network.stricttransportsecurity.preloadlist" to false.

I tried spying on the HTTP traffic in web dev tools, and I see the request gets NS_ERROR_UNKNOWN_HOST. This does not happen when using the xh CLI HTTP client, so Firefox is doing something weird with name resolution. I made sure to turn off the Firefox DNS over HTTPs setting as well, but it didn't seem to make a difference.

I assume that name resolution needs to happen in i2pd. How can I force Firefox to let that happen?

Update: Chrome works fine.

Update: I started fresh and simplified the setup and it seems fixed. I'm not entirely sure why. The only things I've changed from default are DoH and the manual HTTP proxy.

I was just reading through the interview process for RED, and they specifically forbid the use of VPN during the interview. I don't understand this requirement, and it seems like it would just leak your IP address to the IRC host, which could potentially be used against you in a honeypot scenario. Once they have your IP, they could link that with the credentials used with the tracker while you are torrenting, regardless of if you used VPN while torrenting.

I'm preparing for a new PC build, and I decided to try a new atomic OS after having been with NixOS for about a year.

First I tried Kinoite, then Bazzite, but even though KDE has a lot of features, I found it incredibly buggy, and it even had generally poor performance, especially in Firefox. I don't really have time to diagnose these issues, so I figured I would put in just a little more effort and migrate my Sway config to Fedora Sway Atomic.

I'm glad I did. The vanilla install of Fedora Sway is awesome. No bloat and very usable. I haven't noticed any bugs. Performance is excellent. And it was very straightforward to apply my sway config on top without losing the nice menu bar, since Fedora puts their sway config in /usr/share/sway.

I'm also quite happy with the middle ground of using an OSTree-based Linux plus Nix and Home Manager for my user config. I always thought that configuring the system-level stuff in Nix was the hardest part with the least payoff, but it was most productive to have a declarative config for my dev tools and desktop environment.

I originally tried NixOS because I wanted bleeding edge software without frequent breakage, and I bought into the idea of a declarative OS configuration with versioned updates and rollback. It worked out well, but I would be lying if I said it wasn't a big time investment to learn NixOS. I feel like there's a sweet spot with container images for a base OS layer then Nix and Home Manager for stuff that's closer to your actual workflows.

I might even explore building my own OS image on top of Universal Blue's Nvidia image.

Hope this path forward stays fruitful! I urge anyone who's interested in immutable distros to give this a try.